2012 | BlazeVOX

A book of temporally organized form that renounces time, that disassembles form. Demosthenes Agrafiotis’ poetry argues, chafes, bristles, and unrelentingly chomps at the bit of its own constraint, as well as at every other human construct, linguistic or otherwise, that might serve as a convenient container for consciousness. “now, 1/3” is an extraction of sand from the hourglass… as if the sand weren’t free to begin with. —Harold Abramowitz In agraphia, the inability to write, the letter A as prefix serves as sign of a negation — the way to say a thing that ain’t. The alphabet’s first sign annuls the logic of a civilization that defines itself by letters of the law. In “Thepoem,” Demosthenes Agrafiotis tarries with this term that lives inside of his own name, laying out “words for the vacancies,” in order to probe what appears where agraphia and insanity are synonyms for the law’s other side. The resulting text’s “a lever for the reversal of separation,” an oscillation between flow & frame that adds to the toolkit of our “day-to-day epistemology” as we pick our way through the borders of the made “while the technical allegories seethe.” —David Brazil